1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for providing a two-way automatic interpretation and translation service and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for providing a two-way automatic interpretation and translation service, which improve the quality of the interpretation and translation service and allow talking users to smoothly communicate with each other by securing and sharing conversational context and translation history information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Automatic interpretation and translation device and service that are currently being released are configured such that, when a relevant native user talks with a foreigner, a device for translating a native language into a foreign language and a device for translating the foreign language into the native language are independently operated to independently translate the conversation of the foreigner into the native language and the conversation of the native user into the foreign language, thus independently translating a translation target sentence regardless of the content of the conversation of the other party.
Such a conventional automatic interpretation and translation device is problematic in that it does not utilize information about the party with whom the native user is currently talking, thus making it impossible to utilize the entire conversational context even if conversational context information is used. Therefore, there is a problem in that, the conversation of a relevant user responding to the correctly translated conversation of the other party may be incorrectly translated. For example, the conversational sentence of a Korean “. (Transliteration: nan-geu-leul-dongari-hoe-jang-eu-ro-ji-myung-hal-ggeo-ya.)” is translated into “I will nominate him for club president.” by Korean/English translation, so that when an American who sufficiently understands the sentence speaks the sentence “I don't nominate him for the president”, the translation device translates the sentence into “. (Transliteration: na-neun-geu-leul-dae-tong-ryeong-eu-ro-im-myung-ha-ji-an-neun-da.)” Accordingly, pieces of information that have been correctly translated in the above Korean sentence, that is, “ (Transliteration: hoe-jang)” and “president” and “ (Transliteration: ji-myung-ha)” and “nominate”, are not utilized in English/Korean translation, and translation is conducted based on only the English information.
Further, there are many cases where grammatical/linguistic expressions are present only in a language, but are not present in a the other language, due to the differences with the two language.
In this case, if information previously spoken by the other party can be analyzed and utilized, important information can be found in the preceding conversation with the other party and can be very usefully utilized when it is intended to translate the current conversation. For example, in Chinese, grammatical vocabularies related to tense are not frequently used in practice, and there are many cases where it is difficult to determine whether a conversational sentence is an interrogative sentence, a declarative sentence, or an imperative sentence. However, if the tense and sentence pattern of the opponent's language is clear, the Chinese tense and sentence pattern to be translated using the information told by opponent would be distinguished more efficiently.
Further, the conventional automatic interpretation and translation device is problematic in that since it utilizes different types of translation knowledge and different technologies and techniques, there frequently occur cases where even if a first language-second language automatic interpretation and translation device or service translates content expressed in a first language into those in a second language, and a second language user views the translated content in the second language and expresses content, responding to the content, in the second language, a second language-first language automatic interpretation and translation unit cannot correctly translate the content into an expression in the original first language, thus preventing two talkers from easily understanding their conversational content.
Therefore, technology entitled “automatic interpretation apparatus and method using a conversation model” and disclosed in Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2002-0076044 (Oct. 9, 2002) is characterized in mat, unlike a typical automatic interpretation apparatus, a method is provided in which a mobile device presents a translated example sentence most suitable for the results of speech recognition from among translated example sentences that have been previously stored. However, such an interpretation apparatus is limited in that it is inefficient because links must be established for all interpreted sentences, and it is difficult to construct and extend link information when the size of a translated example sentence database (DB) is large.